On the Benefits and Significance of Tradition

I’ve recently been working my way through Roger Scruton’s How to Be a Conservative (2019), and I’ve found it to be quite engaging, thoughtful and thought-provoking, and very helpful. He’s a clear thinker and a great writer, and I look forwad to reading more of his books in the future. In the present case, I was particularly struck by the following paragraphs (from the second chapter, “Starting from Home”), in which he discusses the benefits and significance of tradition for life together in the world. His book deals with political and societal life, not with the life of the Church per se, although he does make occasional references to the history and traditions of the Church. In any case, his observations on the role and value of traditions for a community offer helpful commentary on the place and purpose of the Church’s traditions, as well. So, with that in mind, here’s a little taste of Roger Scruton’s How to Be a Conservative (2019):

"Society, Burke believed, depends upon relations of affection and loyalty, and these can be built only from below, through face-to-face interaction. It is in the family, in local clubs and societies, in school, workplace, church, team, regiment and university that people learn to interact as free beings, taking responsibility for their actions and accounting to their neighbours. When society is organized from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

"In place of top-down government, Burke made the case for a society shaped from below, by traditions that have grown from our natural need to associate. The important social traditions are not just arbitrary customs, which might or might not have survived into the modern world. They are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, as people attempt to adjust their conduct to the conduct of others. To put it in the language of game theory, they are the discovered solutions to problems of coordination, emerging over time. They exist because they provide necessary information, without which a society may not be able to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.

"In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These answers are tacit, shared, embodied in social practices and inarticulate expectations. Those who adopt them are not necessarily able to explain them, still less to justify them. Hence Burke described them as ‘prejudices’, and defended them on the ground that, though the stock of reason in each individual is small, there is an accumulation of reason in society that we question and reject at our peril. Reason shows itself in that about which we do not, and maybe cannot, reason – and this is what we see in our traditions, including those that contain sacrifice at the heart of them, such as military honour, family attachment, the forms and curricula of education, the institutions of charity and the rules of good manners.

"Tradition is not theoretical knowledge, concerning facts and truths; and not ordinary know-how either. There is another kind of knowledge, which involves the mastery of situations – knowing what to do, in order to accomplish a task successfully, where success is not measured in any exact or pre-envisaged goal, but in the harmony of the result with our human needs and interests. Knowing what to do in company, what to say, what to feel – these are things we acquire by immersion in society. They cannot be taught by spelling them out but only by osmosis; yet the person who has not acquired these things is rightly described as ignorant. The divisions of the day, the assignment of tasks in a family, the routines of a school, a team or a court, the liturgy of a church, the weights and measures used in everyday business, the clothes that are chosen for this or that social need: all these embody tacit social knowledge without which our societies would crumble.”